Date: Thursday, 21st May, 3:30 pm (Warsaw time)
Place: Faculty of Psychology, room 3.03
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Scientific Expertise as Habit: A Jamesian View
Abstract
Habits are widely understood as automatic, rigid, unconscious, in opposition to intentional action and to mind more generally: to act out of habit is to act without thinking. This way of understanding habits, often framed as an inheritance from William James, makes it problematic to think that the concept of habit could play a central role in how we understand our highest intellectual abilities. Against this intuitive view, and against claims that it originates in William James, here I weave together ideas from different texts by James to articulate a Jamesian perspective on scientific expertise precisely as an intellectual achievement constituted by habit. More than simply setting the historical record straight, the goal of this paper is to motivate renewed appreciation for the relevance of James’s thought for different lines of research on expertise and scientific practice across disciplinary boundaries.